Tag: ballparks

Braves want more taxpayer money and the sun also rises

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

TL;DR: The Atlanta Braves seek $20 million dollar grant from Florida to build their future Spring Training facility out in Sarasota

Whaaaat?  The Braves want someone else to shoulder the financial load for something that they want?  Never heard of such lunacy in my entire life.

A long time ago, I was in Las Vegas with a large group of friends.  Like most large groups of friends tend to do in Las Vegas, we ended up going to a strip club.  The Girls of Glitter Gulch, specifically. (RIP)  At the GGG, there was this one stripper that periodically showed up to our table, and with the vitriol that only a mad black woman can conjure up, looked at one person at the table each time and demanded, “WHERE U BEEN?  GIMME A DOLLAR!” and like five times out of five times she pulled the stunt, whomever she targeted would promptly fork over a dollar, and then she’d vanish before doing the whole thing again later.

That’s kind of what the Braves are, as it pertains to this situation in Sarasota.  Naturally, they whispered sweet nothings into Sarasota’s ear to get them all wet and excited about the prospect of housing a Spring Training facility, but when it came time to settle the check, the Braves went all Extreme Cheapskates on the city, and at first, agreed to pay for their share of the tab, but as the months went on, the willingness to contribute their share diminished, and the Braves began turning every single stone and rock over, looking for ways to minimize how much they had to contribute, and how much the city of Sarasota or the state of Florida would pay instead.

Continue reading “Braves want more taxpayer money and the sun also rises” →

Photos: A day in Phoenix, Arizona, visiting Chase Field

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

[2020 note]: This is more or less lost content that is retroactively posted, a photo dump of my brief day trip to Phoenix, Arizona, so I could catch at a game at Chase Field, the home of the Arizona Diamondbacks, as well as being MLB ballpark 29 out of 30, on my ongoing quest to visit all 30 Major League Baseball cities.

Maybe after I retroactively get all of my posts up, I can revisit my old ballparks site, and flesh out something more relevant to ballparks, but until then, a photo dump that really nobody but me is going to care about, will have to do.

Continue reading “Photos: A day in Phoenix, Arizona, visiting Chase Field” →

Initial thoughts on ScumTrust Park

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Originally, I had no intentions of visiting ScumTrust Park with any urgency.  I’ve made no secret about how much I abhorred the unethical means in which the Braves operated in order to get their brand new park, as well as the poorly veiled financial and racial intentions behind their decision to move.  And then the cherry on top, selling the naming rights to the unethically developed ballpark to one of the companies that I morally detest, giving them right to be the entity to call themselves the home to the Braves that are for lack of a better term, my home team.

It would’ve been easy to say that I would never go to ScumTrust Park, but I’d have been lying if curiosity wasn’t eventually going to get to me, not to mention when inevitably some bobbleheads would entice me to want to go.  But I figured I’d have waited until the hoopla, spectacle and honeymoon of newness passed, and when the Braves were in third or fourth place by June, then I’d keep my eyes peeled for some seats on StubHub at well below face value, and then make my way to ScumTrust Park to see how things were. 

But I got some tickets from mythical gf’s family over the holidays, and suddenly those plans were dashed.  However, the tickets were for an exhibition game intended primarily for season ticket holders, meaning a reduced attendance, because I loathe insane crowds, and ultimately, I didn’t pay for them.  And if anything at all, it would give me the opportunity to knock the park off my eventual list, but with slightly more reasonable conditions.

Continue reading “Initial thoughts on ScumTrust Park” →

Well, that didn’t take long

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Color me surprised: The Atlanta Braves have decided to renege on their draconian policy to disallow outside food from hallowed ScumTrust Great White Flight Park

I actually am surprised by this.  Usually when a baseball team does something that can easily be perceived as unpopular by the fans, they usually inevitably double-down on their decision and address the media with an as-of-matter-of-fact tone that declares that the unpopular decision is what’s best for the long-term, and that ultimately baseball is a business and choices like these are made that are best for business.

I would’ve expected that the Braves would have listened to the initial outcry of unhappy fans, weathered the storm, and then had a stuffy press release that dictated that they understand that people are unhappy with the decision to ban outside food, but that proceeds from concessions and the take from all adjacent The Battery businesses would inevitably be the coffers in which the team could use on free agents, despite the fact that the Braves are amongst the cheapest teams in the world and rarely ever are willing to overpay for a free agent unless it’s something completely haphazard like Dan Uggla or B.J. Upton.

Continue reading “Well, that didn’t take long” →

Surprise of the century

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Shocker: ScumTrust Park, the new home of the Atlanta Braves of Cobb County, has abolished on of Turner Field’s most popular policies – the ability to bring in outside food

This is about as surprising as finding out water is wet and fire is hot.  Anyone who thought for a second that one of Turner Field’s most popular policies would carry over into the new ballpark was delusional.

Of course ScumTrust Park isn’t going to allow people to bring in their own food; with the park smack dab in the middle of The Battery, the lame name used to describe the epicenter of shops, restaurants and other tourist crap that will surround Great White Flight Park, naturally they’re going to do everything to dissuade people from bringing their own food and instead spending money on overpriced homogenized pretentious crap around the park in order to eat instead.

Continue reading “Surprise of the century” →

I hope Sarasota looks forward to paying $140M for the Braves

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Because nobody seems to know any better: Sarasota County agrees to continue negotiations with the Atlanta Braves in regards to building a brand spanking new exclusive Spring Training facility estimated at $75-80 million dollars

Naturally the Braves are hoping to contribute nothing but $Free.99 towards this grandiose and unnecessary expenditure, while the (mostly) innocent public picks up the rest of the tab.  And as 100% of sporting venues have proven, the initial estimate is always incorrect, and the safe rule of thumb is to double the estimate, and that’s closer to the end result than originally intended.  It’s a whole lot less disappointing when they actually fail to exceed an estimate, albeit revised and deliberately inflated one.

Best part is?  If this stupid and pointless project actually takes off and the Braves get their new Spring Training complex, with public funds doing most (all) of the lifting, the Braves might not even have to make the financial records public.  This is often being called something along the lines of the “Pitbull clause,” since apparently rapper Pitbull found some loophole that allowed for him to privatize the financial records to a some tourism event or whatever, but the bottom line is that because Pitbull did it, it leans to believe that the Atlanta Braves might be able to do it as well.  And what’s more trustworthy than taking measures to eliminate transparency and hiding records that should be public, if being paid by the public?

Continue reading “I hope Sarasota looks forward to paying $140M for the Braves” →

Ohhhhhh-ohhh-oh-oh-owwwnnneeeeddd

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

If you don’t know what the Tomahawk Chop is, take a few seconds to educate yourself on what it sounds like.  Now imagine changing the last part of the chant to a drawn out “owned” instead of an “ohhhhh.”

Because that’s what it sounds like when the Atlanta Braves organization gets owned.

At long last, the national nightmare of ambivalent taxpayers getting fleeced to build expensive, egregious and unnecessary stadiums, complexes and training fields for the Atlanta Braves has run into some resistance, for a change.  The Collier County board of commissioners unanimously voted 5-0 in favor of NO to the Atlanta Braves’ want to build a new spring training facility in the Naples area; naturally, at the expense of local taxpayers, and not out of their own deep, deep pockets.

Continue reading “Ohhhhhh-ohhh-oh-oh-owwwnnneeeeddd” →